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Thought Leadership January 2026: New Year, New You - ORBIT Top 15 Performing Self-Improvement Podcasts
Every January, we see many advertisers follow a similar playbook: flood fitness shows with gym and diet ads, ride the resolution wave, then disappear by March. Meanwhile, the real performance of this channel lives somewhere else entirely.

 

ORBIT (the Oxford Road Benchmark Intelligence Tool) isolates performance using actual campaign data from 500+ advertisers and $1.6+ billion in annual spend. ORBIT doesn’t care about vanity metrics; it only highlights the inventory that actually converts for advertisers.

 

January 2026 ORBIT Rankings

To better understand the marketplace’s New Year’s resolution surge, we analyzed the top-performing “Self-Improvement Podcasts”, which we categorized as shows focused on health & fitness, mental health, professional growth, and/or consumer-facing health science.

January 2026 ORBIT Insights

• Mental Health Performs Beyond January: While many advertisers may think to load up on gym and nutrition content for the New Year rush, the sustained performance lives in mental resilience and mindset work. Unlike Health & Fitness, the Mental Health category doesn’t fade at the end of January. If anything, audiences commit even deeper after New Year’s resolutions have waned. That’s many more months of conversion you’re missing out on if you think Q1 is just about the January rush.

• Exercise Caution With Health & Fitness: Our research reveals Health & Fitness shows are 8x more volatile than Mental Health shows, swinging wildly between big wins and big misses. The smart move is to consider Mental Health shows as your safer “base” layer. Then you can pursue ad spend on higher-risk shows with stricter proof-of-performance guardrails before scaling.

• Play the Volume Game: Marketers operating in the Self-Improvement category should view Q1 as a deliberate testing phase. This is the window to push volume, take larger swings, and evaluate a wide range of shows and formats to determine what can scale long term. Momentum is on your side, and when these ORBIT learnings are applied effectively, Q2 becomes less about experimentation and more about selection. At that point, the question is how many proven shows you want to commit to for the year, not how to rebuild the strategy from scratch.

“The performance sustains well beyond January. This isn’t just a New Year’s resolution pop. It’s an always-on category that’s reliable for performance.”

– Dan Granger, CEO & Founder of Oxford Road

Unlock past ORBIT rankings and insights

 

How ORBIT Works (And Why It’s Different)

ORBIT normalizes performance across different advertiser goals, whether that’s target CAC, desired ROAS, or cost per qualified lead. This allows direct comparison across campaign types, something download-based rankings can’t provide.

The difference:
Many tracking tools tell you who’s advertising and estimate spend, count ad occurrences, or measure downloads and reach.

ORBIT shows which podcasts made money and which ones didn’t.
We factor in what advertisers paid, what they were trying to achieve, how it was measured, including survey-based attribution data, and whether the investment delivered ROI. That’s the difference between counting impressions and measuring profit.

Our methodology:

  • Minimum 3 distinct advertisers per show
  • Minimum 3 paid drops per advertiser
  • At least 50% of placements must exceed advertiser goals
  • 12-month rolling analysis updated monthly
  • Attribution-normalized across pixels, codes, URLs, and modeling

 

For Advertisers

ORBIT eliminates guesswork from podcast planning:

  • De-risk initial buys by seeing which shows have proven track records with similar advertisers
  • Optimize faster with normalized performance data across attribution models
  • Find hidden gems before they become expensive tier-1 shows
  • Break category assumptions with data that shows where your customers actually listen
  • Scale with confidence, knowing which placements consistently deliver ROI

The era of buying podcast ads based on download numbers is over. ORBIT shows you which shows drive performance, before you spend a dollar.

 

Subscribe to The Influencer for monthly ORBIT updates

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ORBIT: The Oxford Road Benchmark Intelligence Tool

Here’s What $1.6 Billion in Performance Data Actually Reveals.

The first podcast rankings based on ROI, not downloads. Built on real campaign results from hundreds of advertisers.

 

After more than a decade of development, Oxford Road is unveiling ORBIT: a first-of-its-kind Benchmark Intelligence Tool built on real campaign outcomes from across the industry.

ORBIT aggregates over $1.6 billion in verified podcast spend, across hundreds of advertisers and 120+ genres, then normalizes it into one question: What actually worked?

It doesn’t tell you which podcasts are popular. It tells you which ones drive ROI. Which ones convert. Which ones are worth the check you’re about to write.

October 2025 ORBIT Rankings

Below are the Top 15 Performing Podcasts in October 2025, ranked by advertiser results over the previous 12 months.
These are the shows that consistently outperformed benchmarks and delivered measurable ROI.

What ORBIT Reveals

• Big reach ≠ big results: Joe Rogan and most tier-1 mega-shows didn’t crack the Top 15. Only 3 of the top performers (20%) are household-name podcasts. Advertisers systematically overpay for reach while ignoring shows that deliver better returns.

• Comedy and politics dominate. 11 of the top 15 performers are comedy or news/politics shows—the exact categories many advertisers deliberately avoid due to brand safety concerns. Controversial content, when aligned with brand values, drives action.

• Stop buying your own industry. We tested it: Tech companies don’t perform better on tech podcasts. Finance brands don’t win on business shows. There’s no statistically significant lift from matching your industry to your genre. Your customers listen to the same shows everyone else does: comedy, true crime, politics. The genre silo is costing you discoveries.

• Faith-based shows overperform. Religious podcasts, particularly Christianity-focused content, rank in the top 6 genres for consistent ROI across multiple verticals—a finding impossible to surface without normalized, goal-based data

 

How ORBIT Works (And Why It’s Different)

ORBIT normalizes performance across different advertiser goals—whether that’s target CAC, desired ROAS, or cost per qualified lead. This allows direct comparison across campaign types, something download-based rankings can’t provide.

The difference:
Many tracking tools tell you who’s advertising and estimate spend, count ad occurrences, or measure downloads and reach

ORBIT shows which podcasts made money and which ones didn’t.
We factor in what advertisers paid, what they were trying to achieve, how it was measured, including survey-based attribution data, and whether the investment delivered ROI. That’s the difference between counting impressions and measuring profit.

Our methodology:

  • Minimum 3 distinct advertisers per show
  • Minimum 3 paid drops per advertiser
  • At least 50% of placements must exceed advertiser goals
  • 12-month rolling analysis updated monthly
  • Attribution-normalized across pixels, codes, URLs, and modeling

 

For Advertisers

ORBIT eliminates guesswork from podcast planning:

  • De-risk initial buys by seeing which shows have proven track records with similar advertisers
  • Optimize faster with normalized performance data across attribution models
  • Find hidden gems before they become expensive tier-1 shows
  • Break category assumptions with data that shows where your customers actually listen
  • Scale with confidence, knowing which placements consistently deliver ROI

The era of buying podcast ads based on download numbers is over. ORBIT shows you which shows drive performance, before you spend a dollar.

“This is what happened when real companies spent real money. If you want to know which podcasts work, start here.”
— Dan Granger, CEO, Oxford Road

 

Subscribe to The Influencer for monthly ORBIT updates

george costanza